Tina Turner, seen here at the 1985 Grammy Awards, achieved "one of the greatest public comebacks in pop music history" during the 80s with her album Private Dancer. Photo / Getty
Tina Turner, seen here at the 1985 Grammy Awards, achieved "one of the greatest public comebacks in pop music history" during the 80s with her album Private Dancer. Photo / Getty
A previously unreleased song by the late queen of rock ’n’ roll, Tina Turner, has been rediscovered by her record company and was played to the public for the first time this week.
The new track, Hot for You Baby, was “thought to be lost to time” but has now been “unearthed from the vaults” in a “thrilling discovery”, her record company said in a blurb posted on Turner’s official YouTube channel.
The track had been intended to be included on Turner’s world-famous 1984 album, Private Dancer, which features hits such as What’s Love Got to Do With It and Let’s Stay Together.
But it was not included on the album and was eventually forgotten in the archives – until recently, when Turner’s label, Capitol Records, rediscovered it while preparing the re-release of a 40th-anniversary edition of Private Dancer, the BBC reported.
It was played Thursday for the first time to the public on the BBC’s Radio 2 breakfast show and will be released as part of the anniversary edition album on March 21.
Hot for You Baby was written by Australian musicians George Young and Harry Vanda and produced by Capitol Records producer John Carter.
Another artist, John Paul Young, had previously recorded and released the song, but his version did not achieve large-scale commercial success, the BBC reported.
Private Dancer helped Turner achieve “one of the greatest public comebacks in pop music history”, pop music critic Chris Richards wrote in the Washington Post in 2023, the year Turner died in Switzerland at age 83.
In the 1980s, the singer had survived and escaped an abusive marriage to her bandleader, Ike Turner, and walked away from the spotlight. She was nearly penniless and had to reinvent herself as a solo artist.
Private Dancer was exactly that: a reinvention. The album, which was recorded largely in Britain, announced to the world that she had returned, and with a fresh sound to boot. It was a commercial triumph and went multi-platinum, cementing her legacy in the music world.
As part of the work she did at Capitol Studios in Hollywood to put together Private Dancer, Turner recorded a version of Hot for You Baby – but it never made it on to the album. BBC music correspondent Mark Savage wrote that the decision not to include the track on the original album “makes sense”.
“It sounds a little cheesy next to the sultry, sophisticated material that eventually populated the record,” he wrote.
In Britain, the newly unearthed track by Turner has received mixed reviews. The Guardian gave it three out of five stars and said while “Turner’s vocal is reliably fantastic”, the song “isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a lost classic” of rock ’n’ roll.
Telegraph chief music critic Neil McCormick said the song “should have stayed in the vault”.
And Times of London chief rock and pop critic Will Hodgkinson wrote that the song is “repetitive and one-dimensional, lacking the emotional depth” of some of Turner’s other hits that made it on to the album.
“Still,” he writes, “to hear that leonine roar once more is always a pleasure.”
